Back then, her videos showed her absorbed in the strobe-lit scuffle of the weekend club scene. As she sang on her highest charting single, Lights On, she was the kind of girl who’d keep dancing even after the venue flicked the light switches and tried to close up. But the video to new single 5 AM features our flame-haired heroine arriving not to another club, but for a masked ball at a stately home. And while the other guests go wild, Katy lurks upstairs alone, waiting for “somebody to calm me down”.

But beneath her sultry costume drama façade and pouty froideur, Katy retains her gift for making the dance floor matter. For too long, dance music ignored narrative. Tracks accessorised with repetitious soul shouts and samples had a meditative allure, but they lacked the blissful escapism that real songs – with real stories and heart – can offer.

Acts like Disclosure and Katy B have changed that for their generation, adding credible contemporary emotional texture to the beats and bleeps. A graduate of the Brit School talent factory, Katy’s voice is nice enough, but her magic trick is to sound like a Saturday night everygirl and magnify those emotions into an almost spiritual, party-wide transcendence, like a street wise, 21st century answer to Agnetha Fältskog.

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Assured and still in thrall to the spinning lights, Little Red confidently and unpretentiously reflects Katy B’s transition from eager young clubber with a curfew to a mature young woman with a home of her own and the ability to hold a little something in reserve. Musically, things are smoother and cooler than her debut, with less jerk and more trance. Lyrical themes include the need to keep moving, escaping from stress and finding meaningful connections.

On the lovely clubber’s hymn, Crying for No Reason, she sings about the damage done by buried emotions, and you imagine she would like to see her congregation with arms aloft on the dance floor, neon lights reflecting in the tears streaming down their faces.

Elsewhere she tackles nightlife temptations: I Like You deals with hearts torn at dawn while Aaliya (featuring Jessie Ware) is a conscious clubland update of Dolly Parton’s Jolene in which Katy takes on the role of a DJ’s girlfriend, envious of the stunner for whom her man is spinning the discs. “Why won’t he play a song for me?” she asks.

Of course, any club DJ worth his wax will be queuing up Katy’s new songs all year.